Skulltrail launches!


Skulltrail - Intel's monster enthusiast platform launches. Intel's Dan Snyder, Regina Wu and Francois Piednoel tell us a bit about it.

Intel's High Performance Computing Vision - ISC08


Multicore Technologies and the State of High Performance Computing

Pre-Release Bionic Commando - Skulltrail

Martin Waern, Grin Video Game Developer, and Orion Granatir, Intel Application Engineer shows off the pre-released bionic commandor running on Intel's 8 Core "Skulltrail" platform

Intel Skulltrail CES Sneak Peek!


A sneak peek at an Alienware Skulltrail system at CES in Las Vegas.

Intel's 80-core Teraflops Research Processor


This video clip provides a brief explanation of the ongoing teraflop research.

It also discusses the technology and innovation that is accompanying it.

Intel tests chip design with 80-core processor


Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel Corp. researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip.

First described by Intel executives at a September trade show, the chip fits 80 cores onto a 275-square-millimeter, fingernail-size chip and draws only 62 watts of power -- less than many modern desktop chips.

Portable Supercomputer


Nortech's mobile cluster, a 32-core supercomputer on wheels.

An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future


In this talk we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-year and look toward the future in terms of trends.

IDF SF08: Intel & IBM Announce 1.2 Million TPC-C Result


Robert Zuber(IBM) and Mike Moreno(Intel) at IDF San Francisco discussing world record tpc-c benchmark result.

New Supercomputing Power for Commercial Markets


Driven by expanding commercial need in areas such as financial services, digital media distribution and medical imaging, IBM today expanded its High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities to businesses with the introduction of the IBM® BladeCenter® QS22.

See the related press release: http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressr...

Dauger Research Profiled on National Television - Part 1


William Shatner-hosted Heartbeat of America TV series profiles high-performance computing with Dauger Research.

Doug Llewelyn interviews Dr. Dean Dauger and Kevin Sinclair describing the problems their cluster technology solves.





Pooch Application

Dauger Research Profiled on National Television - Part 2

Dauger Research Profiled on National Television - Part 3

Academic Cluster Computing Initiative


In October 2007, Google announced that it was partnering with IBM to provide largescale cluster computing resources to undergraduate computer science students along with a creative commons licensed curriculum.

Using the cluster and curriculum as a starting point, students have been able to develop some compelling projects.

Microsoft Migrates From Servers to Supercomputers


Once relegated to the realm of national laboratories, supercomputers have started to move downstream. These days, any business with $25,000 to $100,000 to spare can buy a computing system capable of cranking through very difficult tasks. And, in fact, more businesses than ever have started to buy exactly these types of systems as competitive pressure mounts to perform complex operations faster.

With this in mind, Microsoft’s interest in what’s known as high-performance computing (HPC) makes a lot of sense. The world’s largest software maker this week released a new, specialized version of its Windows operating system built to distribute tasks across large groups of computers.

Called Windows HPC Server 2008, the operating system uses the same guts as Microsoft’s new mainstream business operating system Windows Server 2008. It’s an update to an earlier supercomputer-flavored operating system released a couple of years ago when Microsoft decided to enter this part of the computing market.


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Top 25 Most Energy Efficient Supercomputers


The Green 500 list compiled by researchers at Virginia Tech is intended to draw attention to idea that designers of supercomputers should pay more attention to the energy consumption, not just speed or computational prowess.

The top of 2007's list is dominated by IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers. In fact, IBM had nine out of 10 of the top 10 sites. The only non-IBM installation to crack the top 10 was a Dell PowerEdge cluster at Stanford University. In terms of flops per watt, the top installation was an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer installed at the Science and Technology Facilities Council Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England. It achieves 357.23 megaflops per watt.

Much of IBM's success is due to the use of more efficient processors. The new generation of Blue Gene supercomputers use 850 MHz CPUs compared to 2GHz CPUs used in most supercomputers.


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Cray XT5 and XT5h Supercomputers


Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency, and extending capabilities for the most demanding applications.

Cray continues to be the innovator in HPC and is excited to introduce the revolutionary Cray XT5 family of supercomputers.

The Cray XT5 scalable architecture achieves higher performance levels using fewer processors than other systems.

TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at eleven partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource.

Using high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. Currently, TeraGrid resources include more than 750 teraflops of computing capability and more than 30 petabytes of online and archival data storage, with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Researchers can also access more than 100 discipline-specific databases. With this combination of resources, the TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.

TeraGrid is coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the Resource Provider sites:

• Indiana University
  


• the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative
  


• the National Center for Atmospheric Research
  


• National Center for Supercomputing Applications
  


• the National Institute for Computational Sciences
  


• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  


• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
  


• Purdue University
  


• San Diego Supercomputer Center
  


• Texas Advanced Computing Center
  


• and University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory

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The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) provides the most powerful computing resources in the world for open scientific research. It is one of the world’s premier science facilities—an unparalled research environment that supports dramatic advances in understanding how the physical world works and using that knowledge to address our most pressing national and international concerns.

The NCCS was founded in 1992 to advance the state of the art in high-performance computing by putting new generations of powerful parallel supercomputers into the hands of the scientists who can use them the most productively. It is a managed activity of the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program of the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC) and is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

NCCS hosts only those projects capable of producing groundbreaking results. Each year a few research efforts that require enormous computing resources to realize their promise are rewarded allocations of computing time that reach as much as several million processor-hours.

Such unprecedented levels of computational power are key to cracking fundamental questions that underlie issues of vital importance such as:

• designing fusion reactors that provide clean, virtually unlimited energy;
• engineering proteins to provide new therapies for diseases and release energy from biomass efficiently;
• making wise choices to protect our planet and avoid runaway climate change;
• and designing new materials with specialized properties.

More . . .

TeraGrid is a project to build the world's largest, most comprehensive grid computing cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.

http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/projects/t...

Appro First to Demonstrate 40Gb/s InfiniBand Supercomputing Clusters


Appro, a leading provider of high-performance computing systems will showcase a 40Gb/s InfiniBand Xtreme-X1 Supercomputer powered by Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors utilizing high density computing, new industry-leading Mellanox ConnectX® 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapters and InfiniScale® IV-based 40Gb/s InfiniBand switch running an ANSYS- Fluent airplane structure application.

This demonstration features a powerful and balanced open supercomputer architecture managed by Appro Cluster Engineâ„¢ software that combines high performance capacity computing with superior fault-tolerant capability.


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Moore to come

CPU design and manufacture isn't showing any signs of slowing. The infamous 'Moore's Law' – a prediction by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit will double every two years – may not be based on any scientific assessment of the manufacturing capabilities of the future, but it has remained peculiarly true for the last forty-three years.

Indeed, it could be that we're on the cusp of a far bigger architectural change than even Core i7 augers. AMD and Intel are keen to move more functions onto the CPU, starting with a basic graphics processor, with the end goal of creating simple, power efficient system-on-a-chip that will, essentially, put a desktop PC on your fingernail.

NVIDIA and the ex-ATI part of AMD, meanwhile, seem to recognise that the next big jump in real-time graphics engines is a little further off than previously supposed, and their hugely parallel GPUs are capable of performing important tasks like medical imaging and financial reporting better than an entire farm of CPU servers.


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Researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium have created a new supercomputer with standard gaming hardware. The system uses four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, it costs less than 4000EUR to build and thanks to NVIDIA's CUDA technology it delivers roughly the same performance as a supercomputer cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs!

Here's a look at the specifications of the FASTRA desktop superPC. The main reason why they configured an AMD system is because they couldn't find a motherboard for the Intel platform that could fit four GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards.

Another interesting note is that this system doesn't need SLI, their application uses the NVIDIA CUDA programming model which makes all eight GPUs work in parallel. The researchers say they don't need SLI during a reconstruction as every graphics card communicates directly with the CPU, no inter-GPU communication is needed.

• AMD Phenom 9850 processor + Scythe Infinity CPU cooler
  


• 4x MSI 9800GX2 graphics card
  


• 4x 2GB Corsair Twinx DDR2 PC6400 memory
  


• MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard
  


• Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB HDD
  


• ThermalTake Toughpower 1500W Modular PSU
  


• Lian-Li PC-P80 Armorsuit case
  


• Windows XP 64-bit

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. . . still more.



The guy in this video is the poster child for a computer geek:

geeky stuff.. but, if you look @ this thing:




even with an open case as they run it, you will be in thermal trouble. packing the cards that tight will make their fans very ineffective. the only way to run them like this (for a longer time) will be switching to liquid-cooling the cards.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that researchers in the United Kingdom (UK) are already achieving breakthrough science in a number of key disciplines using the powerful and highly scalable Cray XT4 supercomputer that was unveiled in January 2008 as part of the UK's High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR) project.

Housed at the University of Edinburgh, the Cray supercomputer forms the basis for the UK's national high performance computing (HPC) service established as part of the HECToR project to enable scientific breakthroughs and advancements among the nation's academic community.

In the short time since it was introduced, UK researchers have documented a number of scientific advancements using the Cray XT4 system. Running a number of high resolution simulations at rapid speeds, the supercomputer has enabled researchers to gain a deeper understanding of important scientific phenomena in the fields of materials engineering, fluid dynamics and physics.


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